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1) Australia Plans to Deny Chelsea Manning an Entry Visa, Citing 'Criminal Record'

By Isabella Kwai, August 29, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/world/australia/chelsea-manning-visa-ban.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Chelsea Manning at a conference in Montreal in May.

SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian government said on Wednesday that it would not grant a visa to Chelsea Manning, a former American soldier sentenced to prison for sharing classified government documents, because she failed a character test required for entry.

Ms. Manning was scheduled to conduct a speaking tour of Australia through September, beginning with an appearance this Sunday at the Sydney Opera House with the American journalists Ronan Farrow, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Maureen Dowd.

On Wednesday, Ms. Manning said she would "work it out," reported Guardian Australia, and the group organizing the event said it would push for her to be allowed into the country.

"We are very disappointed to learn that the Department of Home Affairs has taken this approach and will be vigorously advocating for her ability to enter Australia," Think Inc., the event's organizer, said in a statement on Thursday.

The department, in a notice sent Wednesday to Ms. Manning, wrote that she did not pass the character test required for entry into Australia because of her "substantial criminal record."

In 2013, Ms. Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, was found guilty of leaking more than 700,000 classified government documents to WikiLeaks, including reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and dossiers on detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

She received a 35-year sentence for violating the Espionage Act, but after serving seven years, her sentence was commuted last year by President Barack Obama in one of his last acts before leaving office. Soon after her sentencing, Ms. Manning announced she was transgender and would begin her transition to becoming a woman.

A divisive figure who is seen by some as a whistle-blower and others as a traitor, Ms. Manning has encountered pushback over other speaking engagements. She declined one at Harvard University after criticism prompted the dean to revoke a fellowship offer there.

Suzi Jamil, Think Inc.'s president, called on the Australian government to reconsider its impending decision.

"We hope that the minister for Home Affairs and his department will not stand in the way of the Australian people hearing Ms. Manning's story," she said in a statement, citing the need for people "to hear about vital issues around data privacy, artificial intelligence and transgender rights."

Think Inc. said Thursday it had submitted an application to the two ministers overseeing home affairs and immigration asking them to "apply their ministerial discretion to allow Ms. Manning entry into Australia."

In a statement on Thursday, the Department of Home Affairs said it did not comment on individual cases.

The news comes as questions have emerged over a decision by the former minister of immigration, Peter Dutton, to use his discretionary powers andgrant a tourist visa to an au pair after she was to be deported. Mr. Dutton has denied doing anything improper. On Thursday, Penny Wong, a lawmaker for the opposition, called for an explanation from the government, saying the action seemed "inconsistent," on Radio National.

The Australian government has canceled visas or prevented entry of other notable public figures, including the singer Chris Brown, the rapper Snoop Dogg and David Irving, a Holocaust denier.

But those critical of the government's actions have pointed to recent visits from contentious figures like Lauren Southern, a far-right Canadian commentator, and Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing British commentator.

Conservative politicians in New Zealand have also called for Ms. Manning to be banned from entering that country, where she is slated to speak next month.

"This is a convicted felon, sentenced to 35 years in jail, coming in here for money," Michael Woodhouse, a former minister of immigration for the National Party, told the news site Stuff.

"She is wanting to be hailed as a hero for stealing military secrets and state secrets."

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2) Who'd Be on Your Spaceship? A School Exercise Backfires in Ohio

By Christina Caron, August 30, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/ohio-school-spaceship-diversity-quiz.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

A downtown area of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. A controversial class exercise assigned to some of the city's middle school students has inflamed parents.

An Ohio school superintendent has apologized for a class exercise that asked middle school students to choose from a list of racially, ethnically and religiously diverse candidates to save or leave behind if Earth were "doomed for destruction."

The assignment presented 12 potential spaceship passengers, including "a militant African-American medical student," "a Hispanic clergyman who is against homosexuality," "an Asian, orphaned 12-year-old boy," "a homosexual male professional athlete," and a "60-year-old Jewish university administrator." The students were instructed to select eight to take to safety on another planet, ranking them from the most deserving to the least.

"It's disturbing all the way around," said Bernadette Hartman, whose son completed the assignment during an eighth-grade social studies class at Roberts Middle School in Cuyahoga Falls, a large suburb near Akron.

A photo of the exercise was shared widely online. The teacher used it as an "icebreaker," the superintendent, Todd M. Nichols of the Cuyahoga Falls School District, said in a statement.

The intent was to "promote tolerance and break down stereotypes," he said, and help fulfill the district's goal of engaging in conversations about "diversity awareness and social justice."

"The teacher and district offer their most sincere apologies for the offense caused by the content used in this assignment," the statement said. "Future assignments on this topic will be more carefully selected."

The group exercise, which was given to four seventh- and eighth-grade classes at Roberts Middle School, was not the teacher's invention and had been used at this and other schools for some years.

Dr. Nichols said the assignment was retrieved from the Center for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Houston, which posts diversity activities online that are geared toward college students, faculty and staff.

Niya N. Blair, the center's director, said on Wednesday that the exercise could help students understand their biases, both conscious and unconscious, but that it required proper guidance. Her team receives months of training before administering such exercises, she said.

"The wrap-up and the facilitation, that's the most important part of it," Ms. Blair said. "I think with any diversity activity, it's important to understand the audience as well as your environment."

Ms. Hartman, who said her son has a learning disability, said that "no context was given" in class.

"It's not that I was offended by the text," she said. "I was offended that it wasn't even explained properly to the students, which just furthers bias and tensions."

Ms. Hartman asked her son about the exercise after discovering it amid his schoolwork early last week.

"He said, 'Well, we had to rate who we would take — it was kind of like "Survivor,"'" she recalled. "So he honestly had no idea what the purpose of it was."

Ms. Hartman contacted the school on Aug. 21 and received a voice mail message from the teacher in response, but she said the message only raised more questions. She tried unsuccessfully to reach the principal, she said, before deciding to post a photo of the exercise on Facebook. It caught the attention of other parents and a Cuyahoga Falls councilman, Adam Miller.

The councilman also posted the assignment on Facebook, stoking widespread outrage. He wrote that the project was "implanting prejudicial thoughts in these young impressionable minds."

The assignment was not fostering a "culture of caring," Councilman Miller wrote. "This is building a culture of animosity, antagonism & hostility!"

The teacher, who has taught math and social studies at the school for 15 years, will receive a "strongly worded letter" in his personnel file indicating that he "erred in judgment," Dr. Nichols said in an interview on Tuesday.

The teacher did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week.

Cuyahoga Falls is more than 90 percent white, according to the latest census figures.

"They call it Caucasian Falls," said Andrea Hensley, whose 12-year-old daughter completed the assignment in her math class. "I think it's the reason the community has to address diversity in some of these subjects, because the kids don't have the exposure unless it's sought out."

Her daughter identifies as gay and wasn't upset by the exercise, she said. She said her daughter chose the gay athlete.

"I think our kids are confronted by these labels every day," she said. "And so what are we hiding from?"

Parents said the students chose to focus only on the more innocuous labels during their discussions, rather than the hot-button issues of race and religion.

Cassie Jebber, whose son is in seventh grade, said "my heart sunk" when she discovered how the characters were described. But then she learned that her son had focused mainly on the characteristics that would allow each candidate to help others on the new planet.

"What they were talking about together as a class was how to build this better world," she said. But the labels were not shocking. "When I have CNN on and our politicians are speaking, they hear much worse."

Her son wanted to save the doctor, because he would be able to help people survive, Ms. Jebber said.

"He didn't pick the police officer because they were really hoping in this new world there wasn't going to be a lot of crime," she added. (The police officer was described as a "racist" who has been "accused of using excessive force.")

Dr. Nichols said that when he became aware of the exercise last week, he questioned whether it was age-appropriate for seventh and eighth graders.

"I do think that maturity plays a role in it," he said.

Ms. Blair, the director of the diversity and inclusion center, explained that, ideally, students will think deeply about their selections and how the rationale plays out in other areas of their lives. It is often uncomfortable, she added.

"Talking about issues of difference around our identities isn't something that we do often, but we should," she said. "If we're not talking and having these conversations, how can we move forward?"

Susan Beachy contributed research.

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3) The Continuing Tragedy of the Separated Children

Just because mass separations have been halted doesn't mean that the crisis is over.

By The Editorial Board, August 30, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opinion/family-separation-trump-zero-tolerance.html?imp_id=211485090&action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

"I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated," President Trump said on June 20, when he signed an executive order halting his administration's depraved practice of separating migrant children from parents seeking asylum at the nation's southern border. "This will solve that problem."

It may be that signing such an order was a matter of conscience for Mr. Trump — that he felt morally compelled to address the humanitarian crisis caused by his own "zero tolerance" border policy.

But if so, the matter should still upset him. While family separations have slipped from the spotlight — allowing Mr. Trump to enjoy his morning executive time without enduring televised images of sobbing migrant children — the crisis itself is far from over. Hundreds of children remain separated from their parents. Many of those who have been reunited bear the scars of trauma. Migrant families continue to be rounded up into government detention centers, though now at least they are being held together. 

With its zero-tolerance barbarism, the Trump administration managed to do an impressive amount of damage in a very short time. In the six weeks the policy was in effect, more than 2,600 children were taken from their parents, with zero thought or planning for how the families might eventually be reunited.

Less than a week after the executive order, a federal judge, Dana Sabraw, ruling in a class-action suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, placed a temporary injunction on family separations and ordered the administration to reunite all those it had already torn apart. A deadline of July 26 was set, with children under the age of 5 put on a fast track. 

More than a month past that deadline, progress is mixed. After a bumpy start, and with occasional foot dragging on the government's part, more than 2,000 children have been reunited with their parents. But the shadow of what these innocents have suffered lingers. Volunteers working with the families report signs of separation trauma and other mental health issues in the children. Some have become withdrawn and silent. Some panic around strangers. Others are terrified to let their parents out of their sight, even to use the bathroom. Medical professionals warn of long-term emotional and psychological damage, including anxiety disorders, depression, trust issues, memory problems and developmental delays. 

And these are the "lucky" ones. As of late August, more than 500 children still languished in government custody — scared, confused and unsure of ever seeing their parents again. A few dozen have parents who have been deemed ineligible for reunification because of criminal records or other circumstances. (Disqualifying offenses include drug-possession charges, ID violations and drunken-driving convictions.)

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4)   U.S. to End Funding to U.N. Agency That Helps Palestinian Refugees

By Edward Wong, August 31, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/us/politics/trump-unrwa-palestinians.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Residents of the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, lined up to receive food supplies, in Damascus, Syria, in 2014.

WASHINGTON — The United States government has decided to stop all funding it gives to a United Nations agency that provides assistance to millions of Palestinian refugees, ending a decades-long policy of supporting it, according to a former senior United States aid official.

The move was pushed hardest by Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and top adviser on the Middle East, as part of a plan to compel Palestinian politicians to drop demands for many of those refugees to return to what they call their homeland, said the former official, R. David Harden, who worked at the United States Agency for International Development until April.

Each year, the State Department transfers money by the end of September to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as Unrwa, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East.

In January, the State Department released $65 million for the agency and announced it was withholding another $60 million that had already been allocated in a budget process for 2018. Now, Mr. Kushner and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, have decided not to give that amount or any further money, said Mr. Harden, who was briefed on the plans and oversaw projects in the Palestinian territories for more than a decade.

Since 2010, the average annual contribution from the United States to the United Nations agency has been more than $350 million, a quarter of the agency's budget. In 2017, the United States contributed about $360 million.

The decision was made this month at a meeting between Mr. Kushner and Mr. Pompeo, Mr. Harden said. Mr. Pompeo argued against cutting the funding so drastically, but Mr. Kushner took a strong stance and won out, he added.

"What we're seeing right now is a capricious move that has a very high risk of unsettling the region," Mr. Harden said, noting that the relief agency supported about five million refugees across the Middle East.

Nicholas Burns, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and a former senior United States diplomat who has worked on the Palestinian issue, called the change "heartless and unwise" and a reflection of "the most one-sided U.S. policy since 1948," when President Truman recognized the newly established state of Israel.

"The Trump Administration's decision to end U.S. assistance to Palestinian refugees is wrong on every level," Mr. Burns said on Twitter. "It will harm innocent people, particularly young Palestinians."

Mr. Kushner has been working on a proposal for a peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is seeking a way to get Palestinian leaders to drop demands for the right of most or all of the five million refugees to return to land now under Israel's control.

The Trump administration has been working to change some decades-old pillars of United States policy on Israel. Last December, Mr. Trump announced that he was recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, breaking with what the United States and nearly every other nation in the world had done for nearly seven decades.

The vast majority of the five million refugees are descendants of Palestinians displaced in the early- to mid-20th century, and the United Nations aid agency officially considers all of them refugees, consistent with international law and United Nations refugee protocols, said Peter Mulrean, director of the Unrwa Representative Office at the United Nations.

Mr. Kushner and other American officials are seeking to change that designation by the United Nations agency, in hopes it will alter the debate over which Palestinians have the right of return. Those American officials also believe that defunding the aid agency will give them leverage to force Palestinian and other Arab leaders to drop or reduce the demand for right of return, which is one of the greatest points of contention between Israeli and Palestinian officials, Mr. Harden said.

Asked about the decision on Thursday night, a State Department official declined to comment.

The United States is by far the biggest donor to the United Nations agency. Other large donors include European and Middle Eastern nations.

The Trump administration announced last week that it was diverting $200 million set aside for Palestinian aid in the West Bank and Gaza. That money had been appropriated by Congress in the 2017 budget to the Agency for International Development and is part of a package of assistance given annually to help the Palestinians that is separate from the United Nations allocation. About $35 million of assistance in this channel could still go forward, Mr. Harden said.

Elizabeth Campbell, a spokeswoman for the United Nations relief agency, said that it had not yet been informed by the Trump administration that the government intended to end all financial support.

"We remain grateful for the funding that the United States has provided thus far," she said.

Ms. Campbell noted that the agency provided food assistance to half the population in Gaza, among others, and ensured that all children there had access to education.

"Unrwa is a public good, providing critical services, such as vaccinations and prenatal care, that are otherwise unavailable to refugees," she said.

At a security conference in Washington on Tuesday, Nikki R. Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, was asked about reports that the administration intended to end funding for the relief agency. The decision was first reported by Foreign Policy on Tuesday.

"First of all, you're looking at the fact that there's an endless number of refugees that continue to get assistance," said Ms. Haley, who has been a critic of the agency. "But more importantly, the Palestinians continue to bash America."

Ms. Haley said she had made a point of showing Mr. Trump the list of countries to which the United States provides donations, and then mentioning that not all of those countries voted in support of the United States at the United Nations. She said the lack of support from Palestinian leaders recently had been particularly galling.

Last week, John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, visited Israel and was equally critical of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, calling it "a failed mechanism."

"I think it is long overdue that we have taken steps to reduce funding," Mr. Bolton said, according to Reuters.

Senior Israeli officials have traditionally discouraged abrupt cuts to United States funding to the agency, Mr. Harden said, and such officials could still call American counterparts to try to persuade them to change their minds.

In Jordan, where more than two million Palestinian refugees live, the foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, has warned that a drastic cut by the United States to the United Nations agency could potentially be "extremely destabilizing."

He has said Jordan would intensify efforts to bridge any deficit to agency funding and to rally financial and political support for it.

Gardiner Harris contributed reporting from Washington, Rick Gladstone from New York and Rana Sweis from Amman, Jordan.

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5) A 'Jane Austen for the Precariat' Adjusts to Success, at 27

By Ellen Barry, August 31, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/world/europe/sally-rooney-ireland.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Sally Rooney says she wrote her first novel, "Conversations With Friends," to reach readers like herself, "people who share my ideology or have a similarly jaundiced view of social systems."

DUBLIN — On the morning of Ireland's abortion referendum this May, the novelist Sally Rooney was sitting on an airplane, scrolling through her Twitter feed and crying. They were tears of anxiety. It was the most important day in her life, politically speaking, a vote she had wanted to cast since she was 15, and as far as she knew the country was split right down the middle. Too much hung in the balance.

When she landed in Dublin, Ms. Rooney saw women handing out leaflets arguing for a repeal of the abortion ban and blurted out her thanks, "feeling very grateful to them, and feeling like they were my friends — but also realizing they were complete strangers, and that there was nothing really behind my immense emotional attachment to them in that moment."

Ms. Rooney had plenty of experience as an outsider, at least in her ideas. Raised in conservative northwest Ireland, she identified as a Marxist by her teens, and in college specialized in opinions so fringe-left that they could alienate leftists: that men belong to a privileged class and it is reasonable for feminists to hate them; that prisons should be abolished, as should borders and privately held capital. On the day of the abortion referendum, she expected another reminder that she did not belong.

As we now know, the result was a landslide vote to repeal the ban on most abortions, propelled by support among voters younger than 25. It meant that in Ireland, the past was past; new people were emerging. Ms. Rooney felt something unusual, that she was part of a coherent group of people who shared a set of ideas.

"I felt incredibly happy to feel normal," she recalled. "It was like, 'Oh, this is amazing. I feel so at home, walking down the street, seeing people who probably agree with my opinion.'"

Ms. Rooney, 27, has had that kind of year. Her first novel, "Conversations with Friends," published last spring, received rapturous reviews. Her second, "Normal People," published on Thursday, is on the longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Both are being adapted for film.

Most notable, though, is her word-of-mouth success. Her voice has been greeted as something identifiably new: the arrival of millennial fiction. She has been called "the Jane Austen of the precariat," and compared to hipster luminaries like Greta Gerwig and Lena Dunham.

Ireland voted in May to overturn a ban on most abortions. Ms. Rooney said she had wanted to cast that vote since she was 15.

And it is true, her characters are people we haven't encountered much in print. They communicate through emails and instant messaging, but do not regard these as degraded forms: They do not just speak, but compose their remarks, like characters in an Oscar Wilde play. They are skeptical of the ability of markets to provide people with a decent life. They view human relationships — especially sex — as deeply political, worthy of unsparing and precise analysis, but do not seem to read the newspaper. Standing at the threshold of adult life, they halt, failing to see any reason to proceed.

Ms. Rooney, who wrote "Conversations With Friends" while studying for a master's degree in American literature, expected to reach readers like herself, "people who share my ideology or have a similarly jaundiced view of social systems." Her mass-market success is clearly still a little disorienting. "Light and sparkling is the phrase that has been used," she said. "I can't complain if people think it's sparkling, but then there's a sense that wasn't what I set out to do."

****

As a student in a Catholic high school a decade ago, Ms. Rooney was required to attend lectures by Pure in Heart, an organization that discouraged premarital sex. The presenters, having gathered a roomful of teenage girls, would ask for a volunteer to extend her arm and would display a length of clear adhesive tape, telling them that the tape signified them as virgins.

"This is you when you decide to sleep with your boyfriend," they would say, attaching the tape to the girl's arm and peeling it off, now cloudy with skin cells. Then they would do the same thing multiple times, to signify multiple partners, so that the tape was clogged with dirty particles, and hold it up before the class, asking, "Would you want to marry this?"

Ms. Rooney and her classmates sat there, smirking. "No piece of Cellotape strikes me as an adequate marital partner," she said. "We perceived them as bizarre." The abortion ban, she said, was more offensive: "It felt like a vestige of a culture that was not in tune with how people were living their lives."

Ms. Rooney's fictional twentysomethings furnish a kind of response. In the Dublin circles she describes, the Roman Catholic Church barely figures. Relationships are everything. Sex is described with great care and detail. ("I could hear myself making a lot of noise, but only syllables, no real words. I closed my eyes. The inside of my body was hot like oil," says Frances, the narrator of "Conversations With Friends.") She writes attentively of pain, offering eye-watering descriptions of menstrual cramps caused by endometriosis.

Ms. Rooney arrived at Trinity College, Ireland's most elite university, from Castlebar in County Mayo, where her father worked as a technician for the state-owned telecom company. Her parents were socialists; they so often repeated Marx's slogan "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs," that as a child she took it to be "a religious quote, or maybe a parenting guideline." She found her tribe as a competitive debater — at 22, she was the top debater in Europe — and settled into what she would later describe as "an analytic way of living." She and her friend Aoife daydreamed about being "a brain in a jar," liberated from the encumbrance of a body.

Her characters long for the analytic way, too, but are jolted out of it, again and again, often by sex. "I don't really believe in the idea of the individual," Ms. Rooney said. "I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy, and the way we construct one another."

They are battered, as well, by economic conditions. The 2008 financial crash, and its catastrophic effect on Ireland's young people, hangs like an invisible backdrop to all of Ms. Rooney's fiction. Her own friends, after receiving prestigious degrees, took retail jobs, or went on welfare, scrambling to pay exorbitant Dublin rents.

"In my parents' generation, or even before that, people who are in their 30s or 40s, you'd go to college and it was easier to get a job in one of the big law firms, and you'll be set up — you'll be able to get a mortgage," said Ms. Rooney's partner, John Prasifka, 25, a high school math teacher. "Our generation is seeing that's not worked out for us."

Earlier generations may have naturally shed their leftist beliefs as they lofted into the middle class, he added. But with their cohort, he said, it is difficult to see that happening.

"I got all my Marxism from Sally," he said cheerfully.

***

Last week, to avoid reading the wave of publicity that would accompany the release of "Normal People," Ms. Rooney deactivated her Twitter account.

This was no small thing. For 10 years, Ms. Rooney has delighted in Twitter, trafficking in cerebral self-mockery ("♫ getting into lengthy Facebook wars about Greek debt / using words like "creditors" and "Eurogroup" in my actual free time / why ♫"); earnest declarations ("the Irish state has always been organized on the unpaid labor of women"); and too-cool-for-school banter ("this New Statesman piece from last year is so bad I laughed until I literally wept.") Ms. Rooney even gave her character Frances, in "Conversation With Friends," a "Twitter voice," which she described as "a tone of casual self-revelation that deprives others of the ability to criticize."

But now a lot of what she reads on Twitter is about her, and she hates that. The attention is hard for her to bear. During an interview in Dublin, she worried aloud that novelists are over-glamorized, and said newspapers should write more profiles of nurses or bus drivers.

"I can't help feeling that I am not a very important person, and being treated like one gives me strange feelings," she explained in an email. She lingered over the question of whether, in a world facing climate change and white nationalism, novels about intimate relationships — "small lives" — serve a political purpose. At some point, I realized I was no longer central to the conversation; she seemed to be interrogating herself.

"You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication," she said. "All our ideas of what human nature consists of, or how people really feel and experience life are at their base political ideas." Then she paused, and gave a different answer. "I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, and sometimes I feel, if I really believe this is the state the planet is in, why should I write novels? I must enjoy it."

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6)  Little Decline in Number of Children in Public Housing With High Lead Levels, Report Says, 

By Luis Ferré-Sadurní, August 30, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/nyregion/nyc-public-housing-lead.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

Dr. Mary T. Bassett, center, the health commissioner, noted the correlation between the lack of inspections and steady rates of lead poisoning, but could not "attribute causality to it" because the sample size was too small.

For more than a decade, New York City made steady progress in reducing the number of children living in public housing who have tested positive for lead, but that trend ended about the same time that the city's housing authority stopped inspecting its apartments for lead-paint hazards.

That was one upshot of a report on lead poisoning released on Thursday by the city's Department of Health. Overall, the report showed the number of city children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had dropped to a record low of about 5,300.

"The numbers I've seen, coming out with this report, show that exposure continues to decline," Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference. "We've got more work to do, but exposure continues to decline."

Still, the report said the percentage of young children in public housing who tested positive for lead remained steady over the last few years, even as it continued to decline citywide.

About 130 children in public housing younger than 6 tested positive for lead each year from 2015 to 2017, around the same time that the city's public housing authority stopped inspecting apartments for lead paint as was required under local and federal regulations.

Dr. Mary T. Bassett, the health commissioner, noted the correlation between the lack of inspections and steady rates of lead poisoning, but could not "attribute causality to it" because the sample size was too small.

The report marks the latest effort to confront a lead-paint controversy that engulfed the administration of Mr. de Blasio after it came to light that the city's public housing authority had failed to inspect for lead-paint hazards in its 176,000 apartments for at least five years.

The city reached a legal settlement with federal prosecutors earlier this summer to appoint a federal monitor to oversee reforms at the New York City Housing Authority, also known as Nycha. Nycha is the nation's largest public housing system.

The report comes about a month after it became known that the Department of Investigation had opened an inquiry into the Health Department's handling of lead-paint inspections in public housing.

Nycha's failure to inspect its properties has raised questions about the number of children in housing developments that have tested positive for lead. City Hall has responded with months of shifting descriptions about the extent of the problem.

Initially, city officials said only 19 children from housing projects were found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood. On Thursday, they said that since 2012, a total of 1,160 children under 18 living in public housing have been found to have elevated lead levels.

In response, Mr. de Blasio said the city would expand its efforts and inspect every public housing apartment where lead paint might have been used, or about 130,000 apartments. The testing, which officials say will cost $80 million and will be carried out by private contractors, is expected to begin early next year, according to Jasmine Blake, a spokeswoman for the housing authority.

"There have been a lot of numbers swirling around and people have been confused by these numbers," said Dr. Bassett, who is leaving on Friday for a position at Harvard. "We want to do our best to clarify the numbers today."

Since 2010, the number of children that tested positive for lead has dropped 69 percent according to the latest report.

The report said that 362,119 children were tested for lead poisoning citywide in 2017 and 1.5 percent were found to have lead levels at or above 5 micrograms per deciliter, the minimum amount for which the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that localities intervene. The overwhelming majority, 97 percent, lived in private housing.

In fact, children living in public housing are tested for lead poisoning at higher rates than children living in private housing, Dr. Bassett said. About 88 percent of children living in Nycha apartments are tested by the time they are 3 years old, compared to 74 percent of children living in private housing, she said.

Lead can cause devastating harm to children, including stunting their intellectual growth and affecting cardiovascular, hormone and immune systems.

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7) Serving Time Should Not Mean 'Prison Slavery'

By  Erik Loomis, August 30, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opinion/national-prison-strike-slavery-.html

Since Aug. 21, prisoners across the United States have been on one of the largest prison strikes the nation has seen in years. They have several demands, but at the top is the end of the forced labor the state coerces out of them. Up to 800,000 prisoners a day are put out for work without their choice, usually for extremely paltry compensation that in Louisiana is as low as 4 cents per hour. 

With often privatized prisons operating with maximum security and limited communication among prisoners, even discovering what is happening remains difficult, yet prisoners have organized themselves nonetheless in one of the most important labor actions in this country. 

The prison strike is a multiracial action, but that African-Americans make up a disproportionate number of the nation's prison population and its leadership of this movement is no accident. This strike is part of centuries' worth of labor actions to protest the compelled labor out of black bodies by a white-dominated society. We should not see the prison strike as an isolated event. It is instead the latest iteration of demands for freedom from forced labor that go back to slavery. 

From the beginning of black chattel slavery in what became the United States, African-American workers have sought to take control over their lives and work. Sometimes this was through slave revolts such as Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 Virginia. But more common was individual acts of resistance — running away, slowing down in the fields, stealing food from the master.

During the Civil War, slaves freed themselves by walking to Union lines. What was a trickle in 1861 became a flood by 1864, as thousands of self-emancipated slaves followed Union soldiers. What the pioneering civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois called the "general strike" of slaves changed the outcome of the war, forcing a reluctant Lincoln administration to move toward the Emancipation Proclamation and then the 13th Amendment, all while slowing the Confederate war effort by undermining the labor force and thus the economy. Slaves could not have won the war by themselves, but their actions were crucial in deciding the war and creating its moral impact. 

The Civil War may have ended chattel slavery, but the 13th Amendment had a fatal flaw, allowing for an exception from free labor for the incarcerated. Almost immediately, states, especially in the South, used this to control black labor. They began rounding up ex-slaves after the war, passing vagrancy laws that allowed the state to sell their labor. Congressional interference during Reconstruction briefly limited this practice, but by the late 19th century, white rule created a huge economic sector based upon unfree black labor, especially in the prison chain gangs at institutions such as Mississippi's notorious Parchman Farm, symbol of the Jim Crow era's murderous regime against black people, as well as in contract labor, where private employers worked black prisoners into the grave. Increasingly, prison authorities compelled labor out of nonblack prisoners as well.

The civil rights movement challenged this prison regime, but by no means ended it. In Texas during the 1970s, segregated prison gangs worked under overseers picking cotton for no money. This was modern slavery. In 1978, 1,500 inmates at the Canfield Prison in Ellis, Tex., refused to work in support of a lawsuit (in part against unpaid prison labor) started by a civil rights activist imprisoned in 1972 for inciting a riot during a protest against a white-owned store. They started a prison strike, which spread through the state's prison system, gained nationwide attention and lasted for two weeks. 

As during the current prison strike, the Texas prisoners had few illusions of immediate victories. But in 1980, the Texas prison labor system was ruled unconstitutional, and no longer would they pick cotton under overseers for no money. This was one victory in a centuries-long struggle; yet Texas has continued to exploit its prisoners for poorly paid work. 

Just as the public attention of the 1978 strike contributed to that 1980 decision, so might the current prison strike create changes to the current system of prison labor exploitation. That can happen if we make changes to prison labor systems a central demand of our politicians. The strike will continue until Sept. 9, and it is up to us on the outside to make our voices heard in support of these workers.

Too often, we treat prisoners at outcasts instead of fellow workers. Not only are they stripped of their constitutional rights, but even labor activists do not take their needs seriously as workers. Ending prison labor exploitation — what strike organizers call "prison slavery" — should be at the top of the agenda for the American labor movement, as it is the defining feature of work for the lives of huge swaths of the American working class. 

Slavery still has never ended in the United States. It continues every day in our prisons. We must wash ourselves of this moral stain on our society and treat prisoners with the human rights that every person deserves.

Erik Loomis, an associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, is the author of the forthcoming book A History of America in Ten Strikes.

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8) For Families Split at Border, an Anguished Wait for Children's Return

By Kirk Semple and Miriam Jordan, September 1, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/world/americas/immigrant-families-separation-border.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Byron Domingo's sister, Jessica, washing dishes at home in San Pedro Soloma, Guatemala, last month.

SAN PEDRO SOLOMA, Guatemala — Pablo Domingo isn't getting much sleep these days. He barely eats and can't focus on work.

His thoughts turn day and night to his 8-year-old son, Byron, whom he hasn't seen since May. That's when Mr. Domingo and the boy crossed into the United States illegally from Mexico. The immigration authorities detained and separated them — deporting the father to his home country of Guatemala and sending the boy to a shelter in Texas.

Mr. Domingo, his wife, Fabiana, and their 12-year-old daughter want Byron back. And Byron wants to go home. Yet last week the boy began his fourth month in the shelter, a world away from his parents and sister, with no resolution in sight.

"My boy is very small. He's very sad," Mr. Domingo said in an interview at the family's simple cement-block home here in the western highlands of Guatemala.

"We can hug each other here," he continued, gesturing to his wife and daughter. "But my son is there alone. Who's going to hug him?"

Most of the 3,000 or so families that were separated at the border under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, which was meant to deter illegal immigration, have been reunited under a court order.

But in more than 500 cases, children are still separated from their parents, including 22 under the age of 5. Their fate lies, to a large extent, in the hands of nonprofit groups that have stepped into the breach left by the government to do the hard work of finding and reconnecting families.

More than 300 of these cases, like Byron's, affect children whose parents were deported without them. The majority of these families are from Guatemala, followed by Honduras, while a small number are from El Salvador and several other countries.

Advocates have said in court that the American authorities forced or induced many parents to accept deportation and abandon their hopes of pursuing asylum on the promise of quick reunification with their children.

But many parents who were deported without their children, like Mr. Domingo, have found that instead of speeding things up, leaving the United States has only delayed reunification. They often don't understand the cumbersome legal process in which their children are trapped, or know when they might be with them again — uncertainty that leaves them anguished.

"It's been enough pain," Mr. Domingo said. "How much more does the government want us to suffer? It's too much."

The American authorities decline to comment on individual cases involving minors.

Last month, under orders from Judge Dana M. Sabraw of Federal District Court in Southern California, the government submitted a strategy to reunify children with parents who had been deported. Its details were ironed out in conference with the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a suit against the government over the separation policy.

Under the plan, the government has designated officials in various departments to steer its efforts and is coordinating with Central American consular officials in the United States to prepare the children's travel documents. The government has also assumed financial responsibility for repatriating the children.

But locating the parents in their countries of origin and identifying their children within the immigration bureaucracy is difficult. That burden has fallen to a coalition of American advocacy groups that have taken on the task in the hope of speeding up the process.

"The A.C.L.U., private firms and N.G.O.s are largely doing what the government should be doing," said Lee Gelernt, the lead A.C.L.U. lawyer in the case. "Is that ideal for all of us? No. Is it necessary? Yes."

The advocates have been trying to call parents to explain the opaque legal system and connect them with lawyers in the United States. But many of the parents are members of indigenous groups, do not speak Spanish as a first language and live in poor, rural areas of Central America with dubious telephone service.

There is no working telephone number or contact number at all for 56 parents. To find them, advocacy groups have been deploying teams to the hinterlands of Guatemala, Honduras and elsewhere, sometimes driving to remote villages and going door to door with scant clues in hand.

"The reality is that for every parent who is not located, there will be a permanent orphaned child, and that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration," Judge Sabraw said in court last month.

In consultation with the advocates, some parents have chosen to have their children repatriated as soon as possible. Others are seeking to have their children remain in the United States so they can pursue asylum claims.

And some parents who feel they were deprived of the right to make an asylum claim hope to have the possibility of returning to the United States to make another attempt, which the Trump administration has indicated it would strongly oppose.

To mothers like Maximina López Méndez, from the small mountain town of Cuilco, Guatemala, the delays in bringing parents and children back together appear to be part of a perverse plot by the Trump administration to punish them further.

Ms. López said her 6-year-old son was separated from his father at the border in early May and sent to a children's shelter in Arizona. An immigration judge agreed to repatriate the boy in early July, she said, but he continues to languish in the shelter.

Everything about the process is bewildering to her.

"Why so long?" she asked. "It's a scar that will remain, that can't be cured with anything."

She added: "I think he doesn't think I'm doing anything to help him."

American government officials must not have children, she said. "How else could they not feel this pain of separating parents from their children?"

Government officials and advocates said that red tape, including lining up travel documents, can delay a child's departure by more than a month. And sometimes social workers in shelters fail to complete the paperwork necessary to expedite release.

According to the government plan filed last month, the children are now expected to be allowed to leave the country without going before a judge, which may speed things up.

While many of the families caught up in the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy said they were fleeing violence in their homeland, that was not the case for Mr. Domingo and his son Byron. Their motivation was economic.

"We went to give our children a better future," said Mr. Domingo, who works as a laborer on construction sites making the equivalent of a few dollars per day. The family cooks by a wood-burning stove.

Mr. Domingo and Byron left home in mid-May and, with the help of a smuggler, crossed the border into the United States a week later, immediately turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents.

Mr. Domingo knew that for years, adults traveling with children generally had been detained for removal proceedings but then quickly released to await their day in court inside the United States. He anticipated the same treatment.

But that practice changed with the zero-tolerance policy, which had been officially put into effect days before their arrival, and the father and son were separated.

While in detention, Mr. Domingo said, he was made to sign some documents. They were in English and he did not know what they meant.

Byron's clothes laid out on the bed he shared with his father. The family can do nothing but wait for his return.

"They told me that the papers were so that he would be in my arms instantly," he recalled. "Well, they fooled me."

He now thinks that with that signature, he agreed to be deported. Mr. Domingo was sent home on June 1.

In July, Byron celebrated his 8th birthday in detention, without his family. The only contact the family has with the boy are brief video phone calls three times a week that are initiated by the boy's social worker in Texas.

Otherwise, they can only wait in agonizing isolation.

They don't know the name of the shelter where he is being held. They are not allowed to contact the social worker. They do not have phone numbers for anyone in the United States or Guatemalan governments who might be able to help.

Mr. Domingo said he received a call in recent days from an American woman — possibly a lawyer, he said — who asked him questions about his son's situation and his own experiences. But he could not remember what organization she was from, did not clearly understand the purpose of the call, and had not spoken with her again.

The call turned out to be from a lawyer working with Justice in Motion, a Brooklyn-based advocacy group helping to facilitate the reunifications, including getting Byron back to his family.

The video calls from Byron arrive on WhatsApp, which requires a smartphone and a data plan. Mr. Domingo had neither and was forced to borrow money to pay for them. He had never used the internet before.

During the calls, Mr. Domingo and his wife have had difficulty connecting emotionally with Byron, they said. He gives clipped answers to their questions and is constantly looking offscreen, as if keeping an eye on someone monitoring his conversations. Recently, he said the place where he was staying was "dangerous," but he did not elaborate.

These fraught exchanges have left his parents feeling increasingly desperate and helpless. They have heard about the accusations of child abuse in a shelter in Arizona and imagine worse.

"They are innocent children, and the president is truly punishing them too much," Mr. Domingo said of Mr. Trump. "He has done a lot of damage."

Kirk Semple reported from San Pedro Soloma, and Miriam Jordan from Los Angeles.

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9) How Rising Inequality Has Widened the Justice Gap

By Robert H. Frank, August 31, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/business/rising-inequality-widened-justice-gap.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

Rising inequality has harmed low-income families not only by depriving them of a fair share of society's income growth, but also in a more specific way: It has stacked the legal system even more heavily against them.

According to a recent survey, more than 70 percent of low-income American households had been involved in eviction cases, labor law cases, and other civil legal disputes during the preceding year, and in more than 80 percent of those cases they lacked effective legal representation.

Indigent persons charged with crimes are entitled to state-sponsored lawyers, but here, too, funding shortages are widespread.

The stakes in criminal proceedings are often enormous, but civil disputes often produce life-shattering outcomes as well.

As Martha Bergmark, executive director of Voices for Civil Justice, an advocacy group, put it in an article published by ThinkProgress: "You can lose your children, you can lose your home, you can lose your livelihood without having legal help to get you through complicated legal proceedings."

Solving this problem will require not only moral outrage, but also a clearer understanding of how market forces have contributed to it.

Free-market enthusiasts celebrate Adam Smith's "invisible hand," which describes how markets harness self-interest to serve the broader interests of society. Yet Smith himself understood that greed alone wouldn't create a just community. He believed that markets could function adequately only in the context of an elaborate foundation of laws and ethical norms.

But even the most carefully devised regulations aren't sufficient. They must also be enforced, which requires costly resources. Generally, we let families decide for themselves whether to incur the necessary expenses to engage in civil disputes. Yet many families simply cannot afford to pay for competent legal representation.

That's why Congress created the Legal Services Corporation in 1974, a nonprofit whose mission is to support civil legal aid for low-income citizens. But the Legal Services Corporation was never adequately funded. And in the ensuing decades, rising income inequality has contributed both to a reduction in the supply of legal assistance to low-income families and an increase in the need for it.

Rising inequality has reduced the supply of legal aid by kindling resistance to taxation. A sense of entitlement to income produced by the fruits of one's own labor has always existed, but in today's winner-take-all economy, those on top earn vastly more than before. And changes in campaign finance laws have enabled them to lobby successfully for lower tax rates, contributing to widening budget deficits.

Those shortfalls help explain why the Legal Services Corporation, which received more than $860 million in 1981, received only $385 million in 2017(both in 2017 dollars).

Rising inequality has increased the need for legal assistance by inflating the cost to low-income families of achieving other basic goals.

In almost every modern society, for example, an important goal of parents is to send their children to good schools. But a "good school" is an inescapably relative concept — it is one that compares favorably with other schools in the local environment. And the best schools are almost invariably located in costlier neighborhoods.

Higher spending on housing by top earners has shifted the frames of reference that shape spending by those just below them, and so on. Because of this expenditure cascade, the median new house in the United States is now 50 percent larger than in 1980, even though median income has grown little in the interim.

The share of poor families' income spent on housing has thus risen sharply, and the inevitable struggle to keep pace has caused measurable increases in economic and social distress. In United States census data, for example, counties in which income inequality grew most rapidly also saw the biggest increases in bankruptcy filings, long commutes and divorce rates.

Is this a matter of public concern? Most economists celebrate reliance on market rates of pay in the name of efficiency, but many go on to argue that they also promote a measure of fairness, rewarding those who work hard and invest in developing their skills. Well and good. Yet it is an overreach to claim that market-determined rates of pay are morally just.

Many top earners are not only talented and hardworking, but they are also lucky to have grown up in privileged circumstances. And it is one thing to say that someone who is 10 percent more skillful should be paid 10 percent more. But in today's winner-take-all marketplace, those who are only 1 percent more talented often earn thousands of times more. These observations are difficult to square with anyone's conception of a just society.

The good news is that we could relieve both revenue shortfalls and household budget distress — and provide more legal aid to the poor — without causing painful dislocations for the rich.

Many people who could easily afford the tax increases necessary to pay for more generous social services currently resist that step because they believe it would make it harder for them to buy the special extras they want. But that belief is mistaken, because the standards that define special are elastic. When everyone spends less, those standards adjust accordingly.

Much private spending is thus mutually offsetting, resembling across-the-board increases in weaponry in arms races that do not alter the balance of power. Because higher taxes don't affect relative purchasing power, they have little effect on people's ability to buy life's luxuries.

The top 10 percent of households currently pay an average federal income tax rate of 21 percent. An increase of just one percentage point would raise revenue by more than $45 billion annually.

We could simultaneously support the Legal Services Corporation and other social services more generously and inhibit the expenditure cascades that have made it more difficult to afford these services. And most reassuring to those whose taxes rose, the very same households as before would still be in the top 10 percent.

It would be instructive to ask wealthy taxpayers who oppose this policy change to explain why.

Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

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10)  Government Can Stop Paying to House Puerto Rico Hurricane Victims, Judge Rules

By Frances Robles, August 30, 2018

"...the court cannot order the government 'to do that which in a humanitarian and caring world should be done — it can only order the defendants to do that which the law requires.'"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/puerto-rico-fema-housing.html?action=click&module=In%20Other%20News&pgtype=Homepage&action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

David Olmeda moved into a Super 8 Motel in Kissimmee, Fla., after Hurricane Maria forced his family from its home in Puerto Rico last year.

MIAMI — Almost a year after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, more than 1,000 families who lost their homes remain in hotel rooms paid for by the government. Thursday, a judge's ruling gave them two more weeks before that assistance runs out, though he conceded they "may well be rendered homeless."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent $92 million on vouchers for families affected by the September 2017 catastrophe to stay in hotels in New York, Florida and other states. The agency has offered three extensions, but families took the federal government to court demanding continued housing aid until everyone had found a place to live.

"The families have been calling and texting me frantically, extremely concerned and traumatized," said Natasha L. Bannan, a lawyer who handled the case for LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a Hispanic civil rights organization. "There is literally fear that they are going to be homeless. That's what's going on right now."

An estimated 280,000 people have fled Puerto Rico since the Category 4 storm damaged hundreds of thousands of homes and knocked out power to most of the island for months.

Some 7,000 families had initially registered for hotel stays. Most of them have since found replacement housing, but many of those remaining on hotel vouchers are old or suffering from chronic illnesses, which make it impossible for them to pay for their own housing, Ms. Bannan said.

FEMA could have used other programs to provide assistance and chose not to, she said.

On several occasions through the spring and summer, families living on federal vouchers began packing and preparing to move. Each time, a new temporary restraining order extended the deadline and allowed them to remain.

But Thursday's ruling from Judge Timothy S. Hillman of the Federal District Court of Massachusetts was different: After hearing evidence, the judge said there was no legal basis for preventing FEMA from ending the housing vouchers.

Families still living in hotels have until the morning of Sept. 14 to check out — a deadline that now seems certain as a result of Thursday's ruling.

José David Santiago, 40, said many of those living in hotels — many of them in Florida — were shocked to find the cost of living on the mainland to be far more than they expected. Wait lists for affordable housing are often up to eight months.

"We don't want to spend the rest of our lives in hotels," Mr. Santiago said. "We're not asking FEMA to support us, just to help us until we are more stable. If this has been so hard for me, I can't imagine what it's like for the people with little kids or illnesses."

Mr. Santiago moved to Florida in December from Corozal, where his home was destroyed. He is working for a transportation company but not earning enough to afford an apartment.

"Every time the deadline approaches, your nerves are shot," he said.

Lawyers for LatinoJustice argued that survivors of past storms had received more help. Hurricane Katrina survivors stayed in hotels for 27 months, Ms. Bannan said. Hurricane Harvey and Irma victims received seven benefit extensions, but Hurricane Maria survivors received just three, the group said.

The judge found, however, that those previous storms affected far more people.

The governor of Puerto Rico, the judge noted, stopped asking for extensions to the voucher program once a provision under FEMA rules took effect that would have required the government of Puerto Rico to share 10 percent of the housing costs.

The governor's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

FEMA said there are 1,038 families still receiving Transitional Shelter Assistance across 27 states, with about 400 of them in Puerto Rico.

"FEMA is working with its vendor and notifying participating hotels that the TSA program has been extended to comply with the court's order, said Lenisha Smith, a FEMA spokeswoman. "Beyond that, FEMA will not comment on pending litigation."

Although Judge Hillman found that FEMA's funding of the housing assistance program was "discretionary" and denied the request for an injunction, he urged the government to find a way to help the families.

The judge said he agreed with the plaintiffs in the case that they would "suffer disproportionate hardship" from a cutoff in housing assistance, "given that, to date, they have not been able to secure alternative housing and, therefore, may well be rendered homeless."

But the judge said he was legally obligated to side with the government.

"While this is the result that I am compelled to find, it is not necessarily the right result," Judge Hillman wrote.

He said the court cannot order the government "to do that which in a humanitarian and caring world should be done — it can only order the defendants to do that which the law requires."

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11) Man Who Wrongfully Spent 17 Years in Prison in 'Doppelgänger Case' Seeks $1.1 Million

By Christine Hauser, August 30, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/kansas-doppelganger-richard-jones.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Richard A. Jones, left, and Ricky Amos.

Nearly two decades ago, Richard A. Jones was convicted of aggravated robbery after being picked out of a lineup by witnesses who said he stole a cellphone in a Walmart parking lot in Kansas.

But while Mr. Jones, who maintains he is innocent, was serving his 19-year sentence at Lansing Correctional Facility, inmates told him he looked like a prisoner named Ricky.

That resemblance would eventually lead to his freedom.

Last year, a judge threw out Mr. Jones's conviction after the original witnesses were shown side-by-side photographs of the two men and said they could not tell them apart. Now Mr. Jones, 42, is trying to get his life back on track.

On Wednesday, he filed a petition in the 10th Judicial District Court of Kansas, seeking more than $1.1 million in compensation from the state — or about $65,000 for each year of the 17 years he spent in prison for a robbery he said he did not commit, starting when he was 25 years old and a father of two young daughters.

He is also seeking help with tuition, housing and counseling.

"It took a big chunk of my life that I can never get back," Mr. Jones said in an interview on Thursday. "I am just trying to get stable in my everyday life. I am still transitioning."

His daughters are now 24 and 19, he said, and he is a grandfather.

"At that time I was pretty much trying to be responsible as a father," he said. "I was not perfect, but I was a big part of their lives, and when I got incarcerated it was hard for me because I was used to being around for my kids."

"It was a hard pill to swallow," Mr. Jones said.

Richard Ainsworth, Mr. Jones's lawyer, said Thursday that they were hoping for a certificate of innocence and for compensation so he could "finally move forward with his life after spending over 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit."

"This compensation is relatively small given the unfathomable hardship of 17 years of wrongful imprisonment," the petition says.

The petition, reported by The Kansas City Star on Wednesday, is the latest twist in what has been described as the "doppelgänger case," which is set out in court documents that trace the nearly two decades of Mr. Jones's ordeal of arrest, conviction, imprisonment and, finally, freedom.

Mr. Jones's case highlights the flaws in convictions based on eyewitness identification, which is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. Eyewitness identifications play a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing, according to the Midwest Innocence Project, which helped him win release.

In Mr. Jones's case, there was no physical evidence placing him at the scene in the Roeland Park parking lot on May 31, 1999, according to the petition. That day, he was at his home in Kansas City, Mo., cleaning up after a party with his girlfriend and her sisters, the petition said.

But in Roeland Park, across the state border, at 8 p.m. the same day, a man tried to grab a woman's handbag as she got out of her car. She resisted but he escaped with her phone, and she saw the back of his head, she told a detective.

Two other people saw the attack, but the three descriptions ranged from a light-skinned black man to a dark-skinned Hispanic to a tanned white man, the petition said.

The getaway car was traced to a man who said he and friends were in search of money for drugs and picked up a man they barely knew as "Rick." He was shown hundreds of photographs in a database of men with similar names and features, according to the petition, and erroneously chose Mr. Jones as the one he had driven to the parking lot robbery.

Mr. Jones was arrested in April 2000, the petition said. In a lineup, his photograph was the only one among the six images to be that of a light-skinned man.

"Witnesses were presented with no other option but to choose Jones in the lineups as created," said Alice Craig, one of the lawyers and researchers at the University of Kansas School of Law's Project for Innocence who helped win his release.

"None of the other photos matched the description provided by the witnesses," she said in a statement after he was released from prison in June 2017.

During a jury trial, the witnesses, seeing Mr. Jones in person, said they were not sure whether he was the attacker, the petition said. But Mr. Jones was convicted and sent to prison in 2000.

In prison, he was told about Ricky Amos when inmates started confusing the two. "I took it with a grain of salt," Mr. Jones said Thursday.

But an idea started brewing that he thought could help him, once again, assert his innocence. "I knew it was, at that time, it was my only shot," he said. "I could not lose. I had to throw it out there."

Mr. Jones sought the help of the Project for Innocence, and Mr. Amos's photograph was tracked down, the project said.

"They looked like they could have been twins," Chapman Williams, a former intern who had worked on the case at the Project for Innocence, said in 2017. "From there, other pieces of the puzzle began fitting together."

Mr. Amos's address was identified as the place where the getaway car had stopped to pick up "Rick," the petition said. A spokesman for the Johnson County district attorney did not immediately return a call about Mr. Amos and the status of the robbery case.

Mr. Jones filed a motion for postconviction relief, the petition said, and Judge Kevin Moriarty held a hearing last year. Two of the witnesses recanted their identifications.

Judge Moriarty concluded that the court "has no doubt that a jury would not be able to reach a determination that this defendant was guilty, and this court does not believe any reasonable jury could have made such a decision in this case."

On June 7, 2017, Mr. Jones walked free.

"I just want my name to be clear," he said.

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12) Every Generation Gets the Beach Villain It Deserves

By Nellie Bowles, August 30, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/technology/vinod-khosla-beach.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Martin's Beach. Vinod Khosla bought the land nearby on what he says was a whim, has never spent a single night there, and regrets it enormously.

It sounds simple. For nearly a decade, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has been fighting in court to keep the public off a piece of beach that abuts his property on the Pacific coast. What could be more familiar than another case of rich Californian versus the oceangoing citizenry?

But the first thing you need to understand about this absurd war is that it didn't begin with Mr. Khosla buying a beach house. Just south of Half Moon Bay, Mr. Khosla bought an entire beach village — forming a limited liability company that owned the land beneath about 47 cottages, and a little shop that at one point sold ice cream, and the only viable path to the sand.

The next things to understand are that he bought the place on what he says was a whim, has never spent a single night there, and regrets it enormously.

And the last thing — given that the case has wound itself to the Supreme Court, and could upend one of California's most sacred promises to its citizens — is that Mr. Khosla is willing to keep litigating this for the rest of his life and has about $3 billion to spend on it.

Over the years, successive California titans have come up against the vexing fact that the beach cannot be privatized. The State Constitution establishes that property below the mean tide line belongs to the public, and the Coastal Act of 1976 enshrines this, mandating that public access be maximized consistent with (and here is the tricky part) "constitutionally protected rights of private property owners." Mr. Khosla, through his L.L.C., is being sued by a nonprofit called the Surfrider Foundation over the matter of whether a permit is needed to block the road, and the thrust of his defense is that his property rights are being violated.

If every generation in California gets the beach villain it deserves — if the producer David Geffen's battle in Malibu at the turn of the century epitomized the last, Hollywood-based era of wealth creation — then Mr. Khosla is the sandy antagonist of the digital age.

Mr. Geffen, humiliated in the press and shamed by his community, eventually gave up his fight. But Mr. Khosla, who by cofounding Sun Microsystems cemented his place in history as an inventor of the commercial internet, seems immune to criticism. Almost since the day in 2008 that he bought the 53-acre hillside known as Martin's Beach, he has been in court, enduring attacks from multiple parties and crashing through obstacles using every legal tool available. He is driven by an almost manic belief that things must be done right and must be done fair. And somewhere along the line, the State of California triggered him.

Now, by dint of his character, which ticks all the major boxes of the venture capitalist archetype — aggressive, shameless, obsessive and optimistic — Mr. Khosla could disrupt the entire California coastal system. The stakes are both enormous and hilariously low.

If he wins, he could reshape the laws that govern 1,100 miles of shore. And if he loses, all he would be forced to do is apply for a permit to change the hours of operation on a single gate. The legal volleys would undoubtedly continue; Californians do not easily give up a good surf spot. But the last person against whom to wage a war of attrition is Vinod Khosla.

'If This Hadn't Ever Started, I'd Be So Happy'

The tea awaits Mr. Khosla on a bright purple leather coaster. The glass walls of the conference room at Khosla Ventures, his investment firm, are the same shade. The banister too, the sofa downstairs, a hose cord outside, all that exact purple.

Mr. Khosla is on time. He's 63 years old and thin, with close-cropped white hair, and when he pops into his chair he has no interest in small talk. We already know each other. Mr. Khosla is loath to give interviews about Martin's Beach, and it is certainly not in his best interest to do so, given that I've told him for years that he's making a fool of himself with this beach, a place he doesn't even like, and that his quest offends me, a native Californian.

But now Mr. Khosla wants to tell his side. He wants me to know that he is right. And where some shy from conflict, Mr. Khosla seeks it, almost destructively. So he invited me to his purple lair.

"A billionaire is a bad word in this country now," he says, as his tea cools. "And that pains me."

Mr. Khosla has no public relations team, no one sitting in the corner eyeing us — and in Silicon Valley, there always is. Bad publicity, he says, cannot compel him to do anything he does not want to do.

He's wearing black jeans and white-soled slip-on walking shoes. He keeps his body open, friendly, leaning forward, sometimes swaying a bit. He holds long eye contact even as he's moving. He hops out of his chair frequently. Sometimes he feigns ignorance of what all the fuss is about.

"I've never claimed people can't come in from the ocean," he says, seeming to suggest they swim around a rocky promontory. ("No, not death," he says, when I call later to clarify. "Boats.")

Mr. Khosla says he does not even want to triumph. "If I were to ever win in the Supreme Court, I'd be depressed about it," he says. "I support the Coastal Act; I don't want to weaken it by winning. But property rights are even more important."

He does not want the beach at all, really. He does not swim. For fun, he hikes.

"I mean, look, to be honest, I do wish I'd never bought the property," Mr. Khosla says. "In the end, I'm going to end up selling it."

"If this hadn't ever started, I'd be so happy," he adds. "But once you're there in principle, you can't give up principle." He frames the struggle in the Silicon Valley patois of contrarianism. "I'd rather do the right hard things now that I'm in," he says, "than the wrong easy things."

An Old-School Agitator

Early in his career, with Sun and then Juniper Networks, Mr. Khosla helped build the foundation of personal computing and global connectivity. But in more recent years, he has fashioned a new image as Silicon Valley's agitator.

He doesn't golf with the other venture capitalists. He doesn't go to the Rosewood, their luxury hotel watering hole. He says food slows him down, so most days he fasts till dinner. His version of the inspirational Stanford Business School talk was to tell a class of 400 people that fewer than 5 percent of them were going to do relevant things in the end. He has said repeatedly that most venture capitalists are harmful to companies.

"This is why I get unpopular with other V.C.s," he says. "Because I tell them they're not adding any value."

Mr. Khosla's bluntness makes it difficult to find people who take his side of the Martin's Beach battle. Bring his name up around Sand Hill Road, the nexus of venture capital in Menlo Park, Calif., and people grimace. Email the friends he suggested you email, and the responses vary.

"Vinod is deeply principled, and therefore sometimes difficult to work with," Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter and Square, wrote in an email. Mr. Khosla has been a mentor and adviser on both companies and is a frequent dining companion. (Mr. Dorsey also fasts until dinner.) "But that comes from a place of putting what he cares about above all else."

Mr. Khosla advocates truth-telling at every juncture, even if it is painful. He calls the book "Lying," by Sam Harris, his philosophy for life. When he started Khosla Ventures in 2004, he put the phrase "I prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness" on the website, and it has always been there. As an example, he brings up thank-you notes and how he instructs his longtime assistant, Ruthie, to handle them.

"When somebody sends me a gift — I get a lot of gifts — I ask Ruthie to not say, 'That was wonderful,'" he says. "If it wasn't, I have her send a nice note back saying, 'Thank you, that was very interesting.'"

Mr. Khosla is obsessed with things being just right. He designed the penholder in one of Khosla Ventures' conference rooms. He designed the door handles. He built the table. "We went through 12 manufacturing processes, and this was a vertical machine wire brush of Douglas fir," he says, rubbing his hands on it.

The grass outside is fescue, and he chose it. There are flowers, and he picked every bulb. Mr. Khosla selected the species of bamboo that grows between them, and he designed the paper towel dispenser in the bathrooms.

Shortly after he points out to me that there are no visible light switches in the building, we climb a set of stairs to the roof, and he jolts when he sees what looks like one of the accursed toggles. But the switch is just to open the glass ceiling, and we ascend to the prairie grass on the roof. (Fescue, thank god.)

This obsessiveness actually works within Silicon Valley, where there is a culture of peculiar perfectionism. When the technology executive Keith Rabois took a job as one of Mr. Khosla's partners, he says, he did so in large part because of the whiteboards.

"I walked in when I was interviewing, and I was like, 'Oh, my god, I'm in love,'" Mr. Rabois recalled. "I've tried to put whiteboards in offices for years, and they always don't clean properly. But in our office, the whiteboards are immaculate. That alone makes me happy. And I knew I could work there every day."

The "beach issue," as it is called internally at Khosla Ventures, has surprisingly not been a problem in the office. "It's an incredible negotiating tool for me," said Samir Kaul, another partner at Khosla Ventures.

When a company was trying to "screw" the firm, Mr. Kaul brought up news articles about the beach at a meeting. "I said: 'My boss is going to the Supreme Court for a beach he's never gone to. We're not posturing here. This guy's not going to settle,'" Mr. Kaul said. "And then I just sat there."

'It's Really, Like, Wow'

Mr. Khosla's legal team now includes Paul Clement, the former United States solicitor general, who since 2000 has appeared before the Supreme Court in more cases than any other lawyer.

His skills are being applied to a dispute that began with the most minor of directives. After buying Martin's Beach, Mr. Khosla was told by the county that he had to either (a) keep open a road that the public used to get to the beach, and not charge more than the 1972-era rate of $2 a car for parking, or (b) apply for a Coastal Development Permit to change access. He chose (c) neither, and was sued by his fellow citizens.

Mr. Khosla went on to sue the California Coastal Commission as an entity and its officers in their personal capacity. He sued the State Lands Commission and San Mateo County, and, again, its officers. He alleged extortion and infringement of his rights. In his view, the government was forcing him to operate a money-losing parking business. In one legal maneuver, he traced the property back to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico, claiming it supersedes the Coastal Act.

Mr. Khosla won, and for a time closed the gate across the beach road. California's Legislature and governor stepped in to reopen the beach by passing and signing into law legislation to thwart Mr. Khosla. This move required purchasing an easement from him; the State Lands Commission estimated the cost at $360,000, but Mr. Khosla estimated at one point that his loss of privacy was worth at least $30 million. The parties remain at an impasse, and in June, California passed a budget that included language about using eminent domain to take the road if Mr. Khosla does not agree to a price.

After a decade's worth of billable hours, those in legal combat with Mr. Khosla are somewhat awed by his determination.

"All he had to do was apply for a permit to change the gate hours," said Angela Howe, the legal director at the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates beach access causes and is Mr. Khosla's primary antagonist. "It's really, like, wow," she said. "Now, if the Supreme Court takes it up, it could rule about every coastal management program in the United States."

The low point in the conflict was probably in 2012. Mr. Khosla hired guards to stand by the beach access road near a "Do Not Enter" sign, and the police arrested some surfers who hopped over the closed gate. Here was this peculiar billionaire. There were the charismatic surfers. Arrested, they became The Martin's Five. (The charges against them were ultimately dropped.)

Mr. Kaul said that the forces arranged against his colleague simply do not comprehend how much flak he will absorb in his quest to win.

"Here's the thing about Vinod," Mr. Kaul said. "He just doesn't care."

'You Could Say He's Principled'

Mr. Khosla was born in Pune, India, in 1955 and grew up the middle-class son of an army officer. He says his parents accepted his personality early on, though they also learned he could be a liability.

"The priests would effectively say, 'If you donate this much money, God will bless you.' How crooked is that? If I ran into a priest, I'd say, 'Oh, you're a crook,'" Mr. Khosla says, recalling being 12 years old.

After a master's degree in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and an M.B.A. at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he founded the electronic design company Daisy Systems and then, in 1982, Sun Microsystems. The company sold servers and workstations and created Java, the programming language that formed the foundation for much of today's internet. Later, Mr. Khosla nurtured the creation of Juniper Networks, which built the routers and switches upon which the internet flourished.

He became a hero of the political left last decade after investing early and heavily in clean technology, and by funding efforts in biofuel, energy storage and solar. Some of his bets succeeded; others failed spectacularly. He has continued to support and invest in eco-friendly start-ups.

His life plan now is to "reinvent societal infrastructure." He's recently gotten interested in the Yimby movement, a pro-real estate development cause that stands for "yes in my backyard." Mr. Khosla wants to 3D-print houses for the homeless to be installed above parking lots. He sketches this for me on one of the perfect whiteboards.

He wants people to think bigger, he says. Meanwhile, at Martin's Beach, he is pursuing a scorched-earth campaign around whether a gate needs a permit. In February, Mr. Khosla petitioned the Supreme Court to rule on his case, citing the First Amendment and also the Fifth (the takings clause) and 14th (his right to due process). The justices are now deciding whether to hear the case.

One recent cold summer Sunday, the rusty gate stood open. A few yards down, someone was collecting $10 from incoming cars. The cottages of Martin's Beach have windows that are thick with salt from the air; some of the houses are small and modest, with peeling paint, and others are more fixed up. The decks were full of barbecues, wicker furniture and driftwood art.

David Pasternak, 66, was at home making smoked salmon. "If the Supreme Court wants to take the case, they want to go after the California Coastal Act," said Mr. Pasternak, whose family bought the cabin in 1960. "And that's a very serious thing."

He took a sip of pour-over coffee. "What prompted California to pass the Coastal Act was so we didn't end up like the East Coast — miles and miles without access to the water," he said. "We live in a different country here."

On some level, Mr. Pasternak admires Mr. Khosla's conviction.

"He's become the caricature of the rich guy trying to keep people out, and that gives the Coastal Commission a lot of pleasure," Mr. Pasternak said. But, he added, "I don't think he's doing this for money. I really don't think he's doing this out of greed."

"All they said was he has to apply for a permit, and he says, '[Expletive] you, I'm not going to apply at all,'" Mr. Pasternak said. "It's kind of — I mean, he's awfully sure of himself. You could say he's principled."

Part of Mr. Khosla's original argument was that Martin's Beach was seldom used. The spot has become more popular as the case has gotten publicity, but on some days it resembles a ghost town. On a recent visit, the shop was long abandoned, with a rusty door handle that barely sat in its socket.

Mr. Pasternak occasionally gets a knock at his door from beachgoers asking to use the bathroom. The one down at the beach collapsed in a storm. Mr. Khosla was ordered to open the gate, but no one said anything about running water.

A Legacy, Large and Small

Mr. Khosla knows that Martin's Beach has now become part of his legacy — a thing that could make the first paragraph or two of his obituary, up there with helping to birth the internet — but this does not make him want to yield. I ask him why he lets a patch of sand take so much of his day.

"It doesn't, and I don't spend any time on it," he says. "Like, I've spent zero time on it, and I'm not doing press interviews."

And yet I'm across from him. He begins a diatribe about reporters, something I've heard from him before. "My critique of The New York Times is it's all the news we want to print, fit or not. And. …" This goes on.

Later, Mr. Khosla emails me. He wants to summarize what is important to him. It's 2,500 words. I am surprised that so much of it is about his failures.

"I feel I could do the right thing much more caringly and with humility in a much more considerate tone if I could do it over again," he writes. Well — to an extent. This is Vinod Khosla, after all. "I'd still mostly do the same thing."

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